A new study has discovered why so many people hate the word 'moist'.
Research by Oberlin College and Trinity University in the United States shows people cringe at the word because of what they associate it with.
They found that people were more likely to hate the word when it came after an unrelated 'positive' word like 'paradise'.
The researchers write that their results "suggest that as many as 20% of the population may be averse to “moist” and that such an aversion is related to age, neuroticism, and a particular kind of disgust: to bodily functions (and not phonological features of the word)."
With that in mind, the researchers found that people who hate 'moist' also often dislike words like 'sticky' or 'wet' - but did not have any problem with rhyming words like 'hoist', suggesting it is not necessarily linked to the sound of the word.
The paper concludes that the results reveal that 'averse' words "may be similar to well-studied lexical categories like taboo and disgusting words. Our findings contribute to a growing literature on the processing of highly valenced and arousing words."
